Using prosody and phonotactics in Arabic dialect identification

Fadi Biadsy, Julia Hirschberg

While Modern Standard Arabic is the formal spoken and written language of the Arab world, dialects are the major communication mode for everyday life; identifying a speaker’s dialect is thus critical to speech processing tasks such as automatic speech recognition, as well as speaker identification. We examine the role of prosodic features (intonation and rhythm) across four Arabic dialects: Gulf, Iraqi, Levantine, and Egyptian, for the purpose of automatic dialect identification. We show that prosodic features can significantly improve identification, over a purely phonotactic-based approach, with an identification accuracy of 86.33% for 2m utterances.

doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2009-77

Cite as: Biadsy, F., Hirschberg, J. (2009) Using prosody and phonotactics in Arabic dialect identification. Proc. Interspeech 2009, 208-211, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2009-77

@inproceedings{biadsy09_interspeech,
  author={Fadi Biadsy and Julia Hirschberg},
  title={{Using prosody and phonotactics in Arabic dialect identification}},
  year=2009,
  booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2009},
  pages={208--211},
  doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2009-77}
}